Part of the Editor's Choice series.
James Purdy. Photo by Elaine Benton. Courtesy of William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Life is a mystery to Carrie Kinsella, a passive but sharply observant woman whose 40-year marriage to taciturn Vic has endured despite an absence of passion and the loss of their only daughter, Gertrude. Now Vic’s health is failing and Carrie’s obsession with her deficiency as a mother is getting worse. Vic believes she’s on the verge of a nervous collapse, so he gathers a madly eccentric group of family friends to fashion a cure. Which cure resembles drawing a lamb to slaughter.
Thus does Carrie plunge into her senior years, getting the ride of her life in James Purdy’s wholly surreal retelling of the Demeter and Persephone myth. Here Hades is Chicago, where Purdy’s story plays out as a winsome southern Gothic tempered by classic drawing-room comedy. It’s peculiar and romantic—and almost ruthlessly quaint—all to a purpose, of course.
A profligate painter widely renowned for her libidinous male nudes, Gertrude drank herself to death following the loss of her first and best love in “the war.” In fact, everyone in this book is capable of loving truly only once, and rather badly. Nonetheless, they all have exquisite manners, and also secret lives. Their revelations intensify the sense of approaching calamity—actually, the terror of self-discovery—that comes a cropper in Carrie’s penultimate, wildly psychedelic journey through the darkness of Gertrude’s soul. In the end, Carrie will be strong enough to go on without Vic or Gertrude, which is more than I can say for us readers, whose happiness would be sadly compromised if the twinkle-eyed Purdy had never made the nature of love and longing his subject.
—Linda Yablonsky
Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue was recently published by William Morrow and Company, Inc.
It’s a rare delight when a film makes a little-known, hermetic community that is bristling with traditions, customs, rules, and regulations come alive, transcending that subculture through its humanity.
Jonathan Franzen and I conducted this interview at his dining room table, in his apartment on the Upper East Side, one morning in the early part of summer.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Yusef Komunyakaa & Paul Muldoon, Ian McKellen, Sam Taylor-Wood, Thomas Nozkowski, Geoffrey O’Brien, Alexander Nehamas, and Mark Richard.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
